Corpus/Borderlands : A Society in Excess, Marc Auge.

Corpus : Photographic drawings from human outlines

Borderlines : Cley 19, speculative submission for exhibition

ANTHROPOLOGICAL NOTIONS AROUND ISSUES OF SPACES, ORIGINS, SOCIAL RITUALS AND TABOOS.

CREATING CREATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY INTO TEMPORAL SITES, between the concrete and the spatial.

Utilising processes and strategies and terminologies. 

Demarcation, set the boundaries or limits.

Acculturate, assimilate to a different culture.

Ethnology, the study of the characteristics of different peoples and the differences and relationships between them.

NON- SPACES, Introduction to an anthropology of super modernity. Marc Auge. My working practice intuitively reflects and responds to what Marc Auge considers to be the condition of Supermodemity, briefly his defining parameters on the idea of Supermodemity are.

Overabundance of events. 

Spatial overabundance.

The individualization of references. A SOCIETY IN EXCESS.

My creative practice attempts to reconstitute spaces from this condition of Supermodemity into temporal sites, places from which to solicit a sense of a mobile anthropology, a dwelling that is both intimate and public and promotes solitudes and subjectivity.

Marc Auge states the twenty-first century will be anthropological, not because the three figures of excess are just the current form of a perennial raw material which is the very ore of anthropology, but also because in situations of supermodemitiy the components pile up without destroying one another.1

Contemporary Practitioners like anthropologists will attempt to make sense, they will attempt to resolve, to make or rather remake meaning through the processes of observing the phenomena of acculturation. 

1  Marc Auge, Non-Places, introduction to an anthropology of super modernity. (London: Verso, 1992) page 41.

Submission Guidelines

All proposals must be for new work that addresses the brief, artists are encouraged to experiment, be playful and push the boundaries of their practice.

BORDERLINES

Artists translate cultural moments and offer responses to their environment, whether geographical, political or spiritual. Inviting artist's to respond to the theme Borderlines as it requires an inquisitive approach to the site that surrounds them and to the climate in which we live.

Geographical Environmental Landscape

Terrain

Migration (Wildlife/Humans) Transmigration

Socio Political Departure

Borderlands

Borderlines

Borders

Lines

Spiritual Embodied Walking

Wandering 

Wanderlust 

Movement

Borderlines, simultaneously both boundary and threshold.

Visible, Existential, Imaginative, Porous, Contingent, Reflexive, Nowness, Un-Knowing, Awkwardness, Liminality, Territory, Subjectivity,

Concrete Collage : Raku fragment, clay form/photograph, drawing, handwriting and painted surfaces.

 Ancient Lights : Abstract Painting and Constructional Drawing for Architectural Glass. 

Anthropological Landscape : Drawing from archaeological dig, liquid light, field chalk, charcoal. 

Cley, St Margaret's South Entrance : Collage, Sketchbook, working ideas for small glass panels. 

Cell, Court, Domain, Field : Layered paper, paint, and absent objects.

Architectural Concerns : Collage ,drawing, installation, blue prints, historical building plans. Scriptorium : Architectural model for a reading space within a pastoral landscape or community.

Working Notes/Extracts and Fragments from site visit. St Margaret's Church

Silence and stillness, social/historical shelter from/within the landscape

A place acting through our sensate/spiritual world, a space crafted by the specificity of its making/usage. 

An interior sensing space of a protected and defended/fortified silence, affirming beliefs and community.

Subtle and muted, stillness, embodiment from the patina of use. Bleached woodwork, lightness, dryness and the humidity of absences.

Empty and eroded stone mullion windows/ancient lights, architecture framing its un-making worn, broken and repaired flooring surfaces, ceramic and stone.

What does Borderlines mean to you? Boundary and Threshold

Visible, existential, imaginative, porous, contingent, reflexive, nowness, un-knowing, awkwardness, liminal, territory,

Material Process/Inquiry, Praxis, Content, Context

Form, Existential Qualities/Values AGENCY

Mindfullness of the brief to discover things through the inquiry and engagement with the site. 

Develop Inquiry

Documentation, Artist Book, and other media mixed media painting

Small series of glass panels ceramic tiles/facades

Photographic material/photograms, drawings/hangings on Chinese paper

Melancholy Landscapes : The Plague/Vermilion Sands

Film Collages, hybrid processes and temporal states Liminality: Literature/Philosophy/Visual Art

Landscapes : entering/intruding/emerging (holga819) Existential Gestures : Looking away from the sea

Ballard : Vermilion Sands : Speculative Fields/Spatial Practices Albert Camus : The Plague, 1947. (Penguin Fiction)

The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a virulent plague.

Cut off from the rest of the world, living in fear, they each respond in their own way to the grim challenge of the deadly bacillus. Among them is Dr Rieux, a humanitarian and healer, and it is through his eyes that that we witness the devastating course of the epidemic.

Written in 1947, just after the Nazi occupation of France, Camus's magnificent novel is also a story of courage and determination against the arbitrariness and seeming absurdity of human existence.

'Camus represents a particularly modem type of temperament, a mystic soul in a Godless universe, thirsty for the absolute, forever rebellious against the essential injustice of the human condition'

Shusha Guppy, Sunday Times

Walking into Emergent Landscapes 

Walking/Thinking/Physical Entanglements in the Landscape

Deeper Darkness, Photographic Memory/Process, Metonymy, Negative,

Analogue, Negated Nocturne. Walking, Others, Presence, Becoming,

Walking into Emergent Landscapes : Covehithe Beach

The OLD WAYS, a JOURNEY ON FOOT, Robert Macfarlane

“ Walking was a means of personal myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings:

 Edward Thomas not only thought on paths and of them, but also with them.”

“To Thomas, paths connected real places but they also led out-wards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inward to the self. These traverses- between the conceptual, the spectral and the personal-occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its most characteristic events. He imagined himself in topographical terms.”

Working Out of the Archive : Praesentia/In the Light of the Day.

Adam Sharr, notes that for Heidegger, a building was built according to the specifics of place and inhabitants, shaped by its physical and human topography.

Made from earth/clay/fire connected the human experience of earth and sky. Heidegger attributed sacred qualities to the jugs ability to give/to pour. Part of his fourfold cosmology of earth, sky, divinities and mortals. This “fourfold” represents Heidegger’s attempt at what he judges to be the most primary circumstances of existence, “ the inescapable pre-requisite of the world into which humans are thrown without consent (1962,164-168).

Heidegger's Topology
Things exist rooted in the flesh (R. S. Thomas)

Being, Place, World
Jeff Malpas. 2008

David Smith : Sprays, The Absent Object. Peter Stevens
Eidetic Image, Nearness/Proximity/Atmosphere
Temporal Structures,

Unthinking Eurocentrism
The Political Writing of Adam Kuper and Tim Ingold
Justin Kenrick. 2011

Pottery, The mindfulness of making social
Anthropological Notebooks 17

The War of Dreams
Exercises in Ethno-Fiction.
Marc Auge

The Culture of The New Capitalism
Richard Sennett.

VISITORS
a film by Godfrey Reggio

The World of The Anthropologist
Marc Auge, Jean-Paul Colleyn. 2006

The Field.

The basic methodology of anthropology is ethnography. This is the famous 'fieldwork' in which the researcher shares the daily life of a different culture (remote or close), observes, records, tries to grasp the 'indigenous point of view' and writes.
Objects of Anthropology
Politics is also the art of administrating and producing subjects, citizens.


The Woman in The Dunes
Kobo Abe

Site-Specific Art
Performance, Place and Documentation.
Nick Kaye

Heidegger For Architects
Adam Sharr
Poetically Man Dwells

The Perception of The Environment
Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill.
Tim Ingold

Hans Coper
Sensations in the Vessel/Innerness
Clay and The Engagements of Mind and Body

Peter Zumthor
Thinking Architecture/ A Way of Looking at Things.

Zumthor mirrors Heidegger's celebration of experience and emotion as measuring tools.
The physicality of materials can involve an individual with the world.

The Visual Poetics of Jannis Kounellis
Suzanne Cotter and Andrew Nainre.

He translates the painterly relationship of figure and ground into the space of real situations
Kounellis's engagement with the social and historical content and with the material fabric of a given space is critical to his art.

The Castelvecchio in the Opus of Carlo Scarpa
Possibly until very recently Scarpa's work was still judged as anachronistic, small scale and craft intensive.

An Attitude to History, The Drawings, Formal Language,
Technical Specifications of Materials.

What is the relationship between the visual arts and 'performativity'?
Site-Specific Art. Nick Kaye

Wittgenstein : The Duty of Genius
The work of art/aesthetics/ethics seen 'under the form of eternity'
Schopenhauer discusses, in a remarkably similar way, a form of contemplation in which we relinquish 'the ordinary way of considering things', and 'no longer consider the where, the when, the why, and the whither in things, but simply the what'.

Spatial Practices : Thinking Sociologically

'What does it do'?
Oren Lieberman

Molecular Sieve/Performative Apparatuses : CREATING CREATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY INTO TEMPORAL SITES/10 DAYS WINCHESTER

Winchester - Hyde Abbey Laundry

The site of approximately 1,500 sq. metres comprises redundant industrial buildings and a yard at the edge of the city centre and close to the Winchester School of Art. The site is considered to be important in townscape terms and being vacant is an underused resource. The Laundry ceased trading in 2007 and has been empty since. It is a short walk from the city centre, near car parks, leisure centre, Winchester School of Art, the Colour Factory artists’ co-operative, but in an otherwise residential neighbourhood. The site consists of a large industrial space with high ceilings, a series of different sized workshops around this main zone, and on its upper floors, office accommodation, staff canteen and a workshop. The private owner and his developer wish to demolish the old buildings and develop the site for housing; however, WCC planning officers wish to see the site or part of the site, retained as offering employment within the city.

Urban Fallow could encourage the owner to consider live-work units and studios for artists to be constructed on the site and demonstrate that there is demand for this type of activity. The Council’s Estates, Arts Development and Economic Development staff have for some years, been looking for potential sites and business models to establish affordable studios in Winchester. While demand is known, the value of assisting in the establishment of such a scheme is unproven. Urban Fallow has the potential to provide further evidence and advocacy for a permanent studio facility on this site. Winchester City Council would want to work with Winchester School of Art (arts faculty of Southampton University) and the University of Winchester, and the Hampshire Economic Partnership as partners in this scheme.

The building in its present state, although unsuitable for most purposes, is viewed by creative practitioners from a range of practice, as having great potential as studio space (in great demand in Winchester where suitable premises are hard to find - and afford). In the current market conditions, the site is likely to remain ‘fallow’ for some time to come until these issues are resolved, and the market conditions improve.

 Urban Fallow will bring into sharp focus areas of vacant urban land resulting from the slowdown in construction and the halting of some major redevelopment and housing projects. It is important that these spaces, many of which are significant in both scale and location are not allowed to deteriorate and damage the public perception of a place. The project will reanimate these areas of land by offering them for use by artists, architects, performers and other professionals with an interest in engaging with the public to develop temporary events and interventions. As well as transforming the spaces and reducing urban blight, this project could also have the effect of reinvigorating interest and potential investment in the spaces, encouraging developers and local authorities to look at them again with renewed creativity and optimism.

Urban Fallow/Solentcentre for architecture and design aims to develop a pragmatic but fluid approach to public access, cultural intervention, use and temporary transformation of urban spaces.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

CREATING CREATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY INTO TEMPORAL SITES

between the concrete and the spatial

THE WORKING PRACTICE IS FUNDAMENTALLY SUPPORTED BY ANTHROPOLOGICAL NOTIONS AROUND ISSUES OF SPACES, ORIGINS, SOCIAL RITUALS AND TABOOS

CAPTURED BY APPARATUSES  

Heuristic Practices : The trace/space of the anthropological

Utilising processes and strategies and terminologies. 

Demarcation, set the boundaries or limits.

Acculturate, assimilate to a different culture.

Ethnology, the study of the characteristics of different peoples and the differences and relationships between them.

NON- SPACES, Introduction to an anthropology of super modernity. Marc Auge.

My working practice intuitively reflects and responds to what Marc Auge considers to be the condition of Supermodemity, briefly his defining parameters on the idea of Supermodemity are.

Overabundance of events. 

Spatial overabundance.

The individualization of references. 

A SOCIETY IN EXCESS.

My creative practice attempts to reconstitute spaces from this condition of Supermodemity into temporal sites, places from which to solicit a sense of a mobile anthropology, a dwelling that is both intimate and public and promotes solitudes and subjectivity.

Marc Auge states the twenty-first century will be anthropological, not because the three figures of excess are just the current form of a perennial raw material which is the very ore of anthropology, but also because in situations of supermodemitiy the components pile up without destroying one another.1

Contemporary Practitioners like anthropologists will attempt to make sense, they will attempt to resolve, to make or rather remake meaning through the processes of observing the phenomena of acculturation. My practice has now entered into a process that proposes a site for research driven by condition of acculturation. This site of inquiry will attempt to set up an anthropological place of localised relations amidst the condition of Supermodemity.

This proposed temporal demarcation, a marking out of a territory which will become adaptive, reflexive and spatial. Sets out to engender the inquiry of the ethnologist, to attempt of rather to reflect on how the place is organised. This site marks a private acculturation of material sourced from the world, from a hermetic and esoteric realm of private geographies, now processed and made available, accessible to the social.

The observer in the role of the ethnologist with others is invited to formulate their own invention of place through their own curiosity of encounter. This demarcation of space into the social, anticipates an intervention which creates a common adventure for a group in movement.

An interesting comment about gendered space in classical literature examines the relationship between what might theoretically and spatially link the interior with its exterior boundary is to found Mythe et pensee chez les Grecs written by Jean-Pierre Vemant. In this account Vemant describes the spatial and social arrangements of the Hestia/Hermes couple. Marc Auge acknowledges this relation as

“Hestia symbolizes the circular hearth placed in the centre of the house, the closed space of the group withdrawn into itself (and thus in a sense of its relations with itself);

while Hermes, god of the threshold and the door, but also of crossroads and town gates, represents movement and relations with others.”2

Auge makes the critical point that in anthropology studied by both classic literature and history it is identity and relations that form spatial arrangements which are also inscribed in time. It is this time that materially renders the temporal dimension of these spaces and with it our reading of anthropology.

My earlier usage of long durational photographic devices (large pinhole cameras) was an attempt to realise the identity and relation of a place (its spatial activity and fixity) is totally contingent to its method of register and the particularities of fixed and temporal details. In fact these surfaces rendered from these devices are evidences of historical spaces of hidden social itineraries.

1  Marc Auge, Non-Places, introduction to an anthropology of super modernity. (London: Verso, 1992) page 41.

2  Marc Auge, Non-Places, introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. (London: Verso, 1992) page58.

Fragment, research/Mechanisms of Seeing/The Architecture of Image

Architectural Apparatuses of Affect : Daniel Libeskind/Small Voids/Cameras

light; the darkness is a silent solid, the light etches its surface, it is simultaneously sign and cypher. The light etching itself on the dark surface is akin to a revelation, an epiphany before the building is transformed by its users and movement.

Daniel Libeskind’s building will, when finished, offer a path for the visitor, the path of history that crosses the void of commemoration. This void is the body of an absence—that of the Berlin Jews who perished in the Holocaust. The void makes us meet this absence, but we meet it by passing through it. When an absence, in the form of a void, meets the surface of daily reality, memory marks that surface. The Holocaust has created such a void, which, in projects such as the Berlin Museum with the Jewish Museum, is brought to the surface and given a place and a house. The void intersects the surface of time and creates a place of passage, of commemoration, of ritual in our daily life. The void is linear sign: lest we forget. But the incisions in the walls of the main exhibition spaces, spaces which house the historical material about the city of Berlin, create voids through which light is let in. These calligraphic empty spaces create a near biblical writing on the wall.

Cameras consist of small voids, the ‘camera’, a lens and photographic film. They are camerae obscurae  that collect light and allow it to meet the surface of the film. But in fact the light comes from the larger void outside the camera. The moment the light has registered on the light-sensitive surface of the film, memories are constructed. The memory is literally conceived in this meeting and is added to life as an additional layer of being. The process through which void meets surface is therefore also about love—the love of ancestors and relatives, but also of life and its conception.

Russell Moreton, 10 Days in the Laundry

MOLECULAR SIEVE, is a performative analysis of “this place” utilising the simple properties of the pinhole camera. This appropriated apparatus makes visible the extrusive nature of time as it is deposited on the photographic surface. The extended durations required to register “place” impart a sense of dwelling as recorded by the apparatuses passive gaze. These surfaces record and register a relation constructed by the architecture of the chamber and what is beyond it. Movements when visible appear as simple abbreviated enactments caught like inclusions within this consolidated and timely consolation of place.

 

Time as it accumulates on a photographic surface.

This performative investigation utilizes a large pinhole chamber which is given mobility via a sack-barrow. This apparatus produces through its very inclusion into spaces a “spatial practitioner” in its own right. My aim is to utilize this device as a means of registering “worksites” both in the duration of the event and in its pre-performative state. The mobility of this research could be used to illustrate a constantly changing set of dynamics throughout the site and its event. The use of perhaps adjacent wall spaces or even a

“sandwich board” would render a tangible re-presentation of spatial information for the visitor. Darkroom facilities or conversely off-site arrangements would be organised.

Artist Statement 2009/10 Days

SITE is anti-place hovering precariously over the abyss of no-place.1

This “undoing of place” might instigate a threshold and a situation/room from which to reflect upon critical spatial, sociological and psychological conditions and perceptions.

Practitioner with earlier experience in ceramics and glass, recently completed visual arts course at Winchester, now at Canterbury studying spatial practices. Interested in drawing, photography and interventions that can explore our sense and experience of place. My work seems to harbour a need for a reflective solitude, a sense of dwelling amongst absences. The use of materials from the locality (field chalk) imply a personal geography drawn from the direct relationship to an inherited Earth. There is the suggestion that the absence recorded by the trace is an inclusion, a legacy set into a field of materiality, but it might also suggest a metaphysical field of thought. This act of drawing becomes its own experimental field of exploration, a sort of “in­ between reality"( Merleau-Ponty) an enmeshed experience. Perhaps all that remains is some sense of a material memory encountering the realm of the insubstantial.

Interested in collaborative projects and ventures that might facilitate issues of “site” as being the very undoing of place. Site for me is part of the rehearsal for the construction of place, site holds relations and intimacies/geographies that will be over-written by methodologies destined to be terminated to create place.

What is an Apparatus? Giorgio Agamben

by the term “apparatus” I mean a kind of a forma­tion, so to speak, that at a given historical moment has as its major function the response to an urgency. The appa­ratus therefore has a dominant strategic function.

I said that the nature of an apparatus is essentially strategic, which means that we are speaking about a certain manipulation of relations of forces, of a rational and concrete intervention in the relations of forces, either so as to develop them in a particular direction, or to block them, to stabilize them, and to utilize them. The apparatus is thus always inscribed into a play of power, but it is also always linked to certain limits of knowledge that arise from it and, to an equal degree, condition it. The apparatus is precisely this: a set of strategies of the relations of forces supporting, and supported by, certain types of knowledge.

I wish to propose to you nothing less than a gen­ eral and massive partitioning of beings into two large groups or classes: on the one hand, living beings (or substances), and on the other, apparatuses in which living beings are incessantly captured. On one side, then, to return to the terminology of the theologians, lies the ontology of creatures, and on the other side, the oikonomia of apparatuses that seek to govern and guide them toward the good. 

Working Drawings : Spatial Agency/refigurations on the everyday possibilities between movements and social space

The Making/Production of Space

We All Make Space/The Social Production of Possibility

Space and the Social becomes Spatial Agency (a continuity of action and occupation)

Life Drawings : The nature of minor everyday movements/narratives. Becoming responsive and flexible with materials to the dynamics of social structures/contexts. Drawings become reshaped as they are enacted through their working conditions and beyond (a here and an elsewhere, John Berger)

Drawing into the everyday, calling upon an anthropology of the here and now, so as to reveal the spatial and temporal inscriptions of present-day social practices. Marc Auge, Non-Spaces. 

Agency means being able to intervene in the world or to refrain from such intervention with the effect of influencing a specific process or state of affairs. Anthony Giddens/Jeremy Till.

The defining point of agency is namely its potential to transform the given.

 ‘Everyday life is lived in the medium of cultural form. Its phenomenological immediacy is the sedimented result of myriad repetitive practices, yet it is constantly open to the randomness of the chance occurrence, the unexpected encounter, the surprising event, as well as to the refiguration of its meanings by more explicit forms of social intervention.’ The everyday thus acknowledges the historical constitution of the now, but also its very incompleteness demands an active (political) response to what could happen, to the ‘social production of possibility’. It is through such temporalisation that one escapes a myopic entrapment in the present and moves into viewing the everyday as a site for transformative practice. 

Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time. Jeremy Till, Architecture in Space,Time.